Move over Domino's: pizza home delivery is alive and well in Buenos Aires. On a recommendation from one of our tour guides, Sean and I ordered from the most popular pizza home delivery chain, Romario. Choosing from items on the website, and ordering via phone (there was a glitch with the online ordering system at the time), I was told my order would arrive in no less than 40 minutes. And right she was: the intercom buzzed in 30 minutes. Here is what arrived: Two beef and one chicken empanada Pepperoni pizza. Notice how big the pepperoni's are, and how... Continue reading

Yelp, Chowhound, Angie's List, TripAdvisor: user-generated community sites are all the rage these days. The sites offer a democratic way for companies to present themselves, as all of the reviews are contributed by regular, everyday people with a passion and an opinion. Here in Argentina, there is a restaurant-review site which is wildly popular: Guia Oleo. Boasting 100,699 reviews from 482,970 users, the site has information for 4,609 restaurants. Not quite the size of Zagat.com or even TimeOut, but the numbers are certainly impressive. Too bad I learned of this after eating at several Buenos Aires restaurants, but I'll create... Continue reading

"I will take you to the best parrilla in the whole city," my brother Sean's friend Fabian told us. The best steakhouse in a city brimming with steakhouses? Clearly, an offer we could not refuse. Especially since Fabian has been working as a Buenos Aires tour guide for more than 5 years. We arrived at Parrilla Peña at around 11:30 pm -- the typical dinner hour for a Friday evening in Buenos Aires. Though Sean and I each had 5 Buenos Aires guide books between us -- Parrilla Peña was in none of them -- which was fine. Sometimes you... Continue reading

So my brother decided that we needed to celebrate our 40th birthday by visiting Buenos Aires. For me, I saw this as an incredible opportunity to explore a city that has recently become an international foodie destination. I also needed an excuse to practice my Spanish -- and what better opportunity than to read menus and speak to people in restaurants? This and several successive blogposts will detail my culinary adventures large and small in this exciting city. After settling in to the apartment in Recoleta, we decided we needed a quick bite in the neighborhood, then an afternoon nap.... Continue reading

Manny Fernandez writes: “The death of an obscure New York entrepreneur on July 27 — Morrie Yohai, 90, a World War II veteran who was the man responsible for Cheez Doodles — was a reminder that the world of junk food is no different from celebrated American industries.” via www.nytimes.com Continue reading

Find a market – According to the USDA, there are 5,274 farmers' markets across the country. Have you been meaning to check out your local market or take a field trip to a new one in your area? Search for farmers' markets at Local Harvest or the USDA. via www.thekitchn.com Continue reading

via www.nytimes.com ON the BBC’s Saturday morning cooking show, “Saturday Kitchen,” last month, the British chef Silvena Rowe, six feet tall with azure eyes and bleached blond hair streaked with purple to match the cover of her new cookbook, “Purple Citrus & Sweet Perfume,” told the audience she had something to announce. She would shortly be taking over the restaurant in the slick May Fair Hotel in London, and the kitchen would use the exotic recipes from her book. Named for the tart flavor of the purplish sumac plant, “Purple Citrus & Sweet Perfume” contains recipes inspired by the cuisine... Continue reading

The following article is reprinted with permission from Technomic. For the original article, please click here. July 2010Signs of Improvement? By Arjun Chakravarti, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of Management and Marketing, IIT Stuart School of Business Consulting Economist for Technomic, Inc. After three years of unprecedented uncertainty, the overall economic outlook has improved significantly across a number of key sectors. Services, manufacturing, and export output have all risen sharply leading to three consecutive quarters of GDP growth and upgraded GDP growth forecasts—from 2.6 percent to 3.2 percent—for 2010. Although the economy is at its healthiest point in several years, success will... Continue reading

More than matzo balls: Kosher cooking revisited By DANIELLA CHESLOW (AP) JERUSALEM — The men behind a unique six-hour eating marathon in Jerusalem want diners to know two things about locusts: First, they taste great stir-fried, and second, they're kosher. When 240 observant Jews sat down to the 18-course dinner earlier this month, they were served a veritable zoo of animals that were unlikely candidates to be eaten under traditional Jewish dietary laws, known as kashrut. Eating kosher, the organizers want to say, does not just mean chicken soup and matzo balls; the list of animals eaten by Jewish communities... Continue reading

OK, I goofed. In my July 18, 2010 post, "Stir-Fried Vermicelli with Shredded Chicken and Vegetables," I made a mistake. The recipe calls for a teaspoon of Chinese rice wine for the marinade for the chicken. I erroneously used mirin, when I should have used Chinese rice wine. The cookbook author, Helen Chen, contacted me to point out this error:The Chinese cooking wine called for in the recipe is not mirin. Mirin is a sweet Japanese wine for Japanese cuisine and the Chinese don't use it. Since this seems to be a common misperception you may wish to bring this... Continue reading

Michael Batterberry, a food writer and historian who with his wife founded two enduring, influential magazines, Food & Wine and Food Arts, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. Mr. Batterberry, who in recent years had genteelly declined to disclose his age to the news media — “Age entries should be reserved for wine lists,” he once told The New York Times — was 78. via www.nytimes.com Continue reading

Specialty food retailers, such as Trader Joe's and Whole Foods, have capitalized on renewed consumer interest in and acceptance of private label foods and enjoyed greater growth in store brand product sales between 2005 and 2009 than traditional supermarkets, according to "Private Label Food and Beverage in the U.S." by market research publisher Packaged Facts. Packaged Facts estimates private-label food and beverage dollar sales totaled $87 billion in 2009, to account for 17% of total food and beverage retail sales in the United States. Dollar sales rose 6% over the 2008 level of $82 billion, driven primarily by a 7%... Continue reading

Half of Americans (50%) say they watch TV shows about cooking very often or occasionally, but half (50%) say they watch these shows rarely or never. Looking a little more specifically, just one in five U.S. adults (21%) say they never watch TV shows about cooking while three in ten (29%) do so rarely, one-third (34%) do so occasionally and 15% watch cooking shows very often. These are some of the findings of the Harris Poll, conducted online between May 10 and 17, 2010, among 2,503 online U.S. adults ages 18 and over. Certain groups are more likely to watch... Continue reading

ALBRIGHTON, ENGLAND — Many Europeans recoil at the very idea of cloning animals, but a handful of breeders in Switzerland, Britain and possibly other countries have imported semen and embryos from cloned animals or their progeny from the United States, seeking to create more consistently plump and productive livestock. And although no vendor has publicly acknowledged it, meat or dairy products originating from such techniques are believed to be already on supermarket shelves. The amounts are no doubt small and the sale appears to be currently perfectly legal. But the development is noteworthy on a continent that has long objected... Continue reading

TOMAS LEE has long dreamed of selling American consumers on Korean barbecue. Mr. Lee, a 42-year-old native of Seoul, South Korea, who grew up in Mustang, Okla., took a step toward realizing that dream in October 2009 when he opened Hankook Taqueria in Atlanta, serving tacos stuffed with soy- and garlic-marinated beef, along with chicken and pork, all barbecued in the Korean style. “I was going to open a traditional Korean barbecue restaurant,” Mr. Lee said. Then his wife, Mackenzie, had an idea. “She saw this thing about Kogi on the Web,” he recalled. “And I thought tacos might be... Continue reading